


Rise and Fall

by MokieMorty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical language, Gen, canon compliant up until canon gets vague and dodgey or i just forget stuff, first fic in a really long time, possibly other Felts eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 00:36:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11909550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MokieMorty/pseuds/MokieMorty
Summary: When you hit the bottom, the only way you can go is up. So they say. Jack Noir had always hoped to skip that first part, but, there he was, marooned in the burned-out husk of a long-dead civilization, nothing to his name but some torn clothes and stone-cold grudge.





	Rise and Fall

"Ow, shit!" The Straggler hissed, and jerked his hand away from the burnt pile of rubble he'd been rummaging through. He checked his hand- Yep, he'd cut his fingers up pretty good. Calloused though they'd been come since the start of his exile, his hands were still far better suited for paper work than sifting through the shards of rusted metal that littered this place. He inelegantly shoved his fingertips into his mouth, sucking out whatever bits of debris had managed to work themselves into the new gashes. It was a good thing there were no horrible diseases associated with rusty metal, or the Straggler here might just lose an arm. Then where would he be?

  
Still, despite the unfortunate loss of some blood and carapace, this heap of refuse was the best thing that had happened to him since his exile. If this stuff was still sharp enough to slice his hide, it was sharp enough to be made into a weapon. He'd yet to run into anything more dangerous than an ugly (and horrible tasting) shrub, but he knew he wasn't alone out here. At the very least, he knew she was here.

  
After he was satisfied that his blood has clotted as well as it was going too, he dressed it with a scrap of fabric torn from his tattered and sun bleached uniform before setting about more carefully disassembling the remains of the- what was this, a downed shuttle? In any event, Armageddon had done a serious number on the thing. It's chassis was twisted and scorched from reentry, it's glass broken and it's pilot- no better for wear, and nothing good in the pockets.

  
The body of the vehical was broken up pretty well- and brittle enough that he could break off smaller, jagged pieces more suited for weaponry. It was a bit disappointing. If these things didn't break in one use, they would be dull before the end of any prolonged fight. Better to keep his fights breif, then, he thought. He stuffed a few nice, pointy looking pieces into the makeshift bag hanging at his side- nothing more than a square of clothe with the corners tied up, really fashionable out here in the Alternian wasteland. He set one piece aside, and began ripping up even more of the metal corpse, tearing through the roots of whatever desert weed had grown around the abandoned chasis.  
As expected, there was nothing that looked immediately useful, but the Straggler knew what he was doing. Sort of. He torn up the dashboard, the seats, the small storage compartment, the cup holder- anything he could manage to pry away with his cracked little hands- was soon strewn about the ground. Ah-ha. He wasn't sure what the piece was- some sort of lever or a stick-shift, maybe? But it was long-ish and mostly cylindrical, and just what he needed to turn his scraps into a nice spear.

  
The whole process of hunting, salvaging, and building his weapon had taken the better part of the day- and 'day' was still a strange concept to our Straggler, who'd spent his whole life living on a planet with no real sun. He had a vague idea of how one was supposed to measure time on a more conventional planet like this. Namely that it took a set amount of time for the sun to leave and come back every day. It was dim on the horizon, now, that sun. Damn, that sun...

  
He remembered his co-conspirators back on Derse- trolls, they were called, natives of this hellhole- had told him that one of their party members had gone blind just from looking at that wretched sun. Well, he still had both of his eyes so far, so either carapaces like him were made of much tougher stuff than these 'troll' things, or the Reckoning had caused some real environmental fuckery around here, and the atmosphere had suffered almost as much as the rest of the planet.

  
Yeah, and, as if it wasn't bad enough that every sign of civilization had been wiped clean hundreds of years before the Straggler even arrived, it seemed like all the water had either been burried under cascades of meteors and the dirt and sand they'd kicked up, or else just dried up completely.

  
So, for anyone keeping score, this put our Straggler at no modern comforts, no food apart from the rare, beyond indigestable desert flora, no water, and no company. On the plus side, he was armed now. So, yippity-fucking-do to that.

  
He dropped himself down into the dirt- he didn't have any kind of sleeping bag, nor did he know how to start a fire, so this place was as good as any to rest for the night. He kicked the bits of ratty uphlstory and lose screws out of the way as he settled, turning his gaze upward at the slowly blooming stars. He thought about waxing poetically about how beautiful they were with absolutely zero light pollution for exactly half a second before remembering that he didn't give a shit. He rolled over, doing his best to burry his head under his arms to ward off the morning sunburn that he'd been suffering as of late. Was it, possibly, getting hotter around here?

  
He needed to find water, he reminded himself. That was, and always was, priority one. For three days now, he'd been looking. It had to be somewhere- or else where did all the plants come from? The Straggler was no farmer- the consorts did all that back home- but he at least knew there couldn't be plants without water.  
Don't think to hard about it, buddy, he told himself. He didn't know enough about geology or whatever to think his way out of this. He was going to have to rely on his luck- surely he still had some of that left?

  
He was lucky enough to fall asleep pretty quickly, anyways.

  
\---

  
He woke up earlier than usual- dammit, he thought. He'd slept with his mouth open. Now his dehydrated throat was even drier, his lips already begining to bleed. The exile was slow enough to wake up on a good day, but with nothing but hunger in his belly and sun in his head, all he wanted to do was curl back up. Why was he awake already, anyways? He could still see that ugly green moon high over his head.

  
Maybe it was because of that mysterious rumbling that shook the ground beneath him?

  
He shot to his feet, and had no time to bother with picking a direction before his instincts practically pushed him away. He had no idea what it was, or even where it was coming from apart from a general sense of 'right beneath him.' Perhaps if he'd been a bit more energetic, or at least more attached to his little campsite, he might have stuck around. But, he'd learned long ago that sometimes, you just have to pick your battles.

  
Unfortunately, loathe as the Straggler was to admit it, this thing got the drop on him. He'd barely made it a dozen steps before the ground split, a jagged fissure not three feet in front of him. He switched gears immediately, backpedaling like hell as the dirt and gravel shifted beneath his feet. He pitched backward as the beast emerged, knocking him flat on his ass to stare up at the alien before him.

  
He saw a head- about twice as wide as the Straggler was tall. It's split snouts were covered in damp clumps of mud, much like the rest of it's translucent, white skin. Of more interest to the exile than the things noses, however, were it's teeth- fangs, really, if he were to call a potato a potato- long as swords and yellowed with age. It pulled itself out of the earth, supporting stocky body on short legs (relative to it's massive size) and long, chipped claws. For tunneling, he would have supposed, were he not fearing for his life to much to ponder the Lusus and it's alien biology. The things whiskers twitched- it might have been a kind of cute sight, if it's head didn't then whip in the Straggler's direction.

  
Alright, go for the eyes, always go for the eyes, he told himself. He'd been in enough boss fights now to know how these things worked. He lifted his new spear- he must have had some luck, after all. He stepped forward, running purely on adrenaline now as he charged for the beasts eyes-

  
Wait, it didn't have eyes. Shit. Shit. Shit. Why wouldn't a subterranean monster-mole have eyes?

  
The creature ambled forward, it's six stubby legs didn't move quickly, but, give that they were almost as tall as as the Dersite that it chased, it gained ground fast, forcing said carapace into a strategic retreat. That is to say, the Straggler was now running for his life. He couldn't outrun it, of course. But, maybe he still had enough in him to outsmart it, at the very least.

  
The shell of the downed ship he'd been picking through last night was still there, half buried in the dirt and emptied of anything useful. Hopefully, that would make a decent hiding place. The Straggler lept up into the rusted metal frame, and dropped through the glass-less window. Perhaps if he weren't in such a hurry, he would have thought harder about the fact that an animal with no eyes would not be deterred by a visual barrier. The idea did, eventually, smack him in the face, when the creature wedged one of it's sizable snouts beneath the chassis, and began scratching and scraping.

  
The sound of it's claws scraping metal was horrible, as was the vibration caused by the animal's busy digging. But, the Straggler had no choice but to stick around and hope the thing got bored before it broke the pod down enough to get inside.

  
Before he could think to brace himself against anything, the dead vehicle pitched heavily to one side. With a tortured squeak of metal grinding old metal, the the whole pod rolled, dropping the Straggler on his head, and rolled once more before it came to a complete stop. This left our straggler somewhat out of sorts, if only for a moment. When he managed to shake the dizziness from his head, he heard- Well, nothing much. Did the thing freak itself out and run away?

  
Cautiously, he moved to take a peak at the scene through the same window he'd crawled through- this was made a bit harder, as that window was now directly above him and his stubby legs, but he was nothing if not persistent. He eventually managed to poke his head out and oh shit it was still there. But it wasn't chasing him anymore.  
Actually, it still had it's ugly face buried in the dirt. "The hell're you doin'?" He asked. He certainly wasn't lonely enough yet to expect the thing to speak back to him. It was a completely rhetorical question that he almost instantly regretted when the creature lifted it's filthy face at the sound of his cracked voice.

  
It quickly lost interest again, and returned to it's work. As the Straggler slowly began to pull himself out of the vehicle- quietly as he could- he saw that it was digging up some sort of small, lumpy bulbs. Tubers, in fact. It seemed the weeds that he'd been ripping up yesterday had grown some sort of root vegetable beneath the craft in the centuries they'd been growing there, and though they were shriveled with age, the monster thing seemed to be enjoying them. Now that he was looking at the thing, well, it was clearly an herbivore. For as big as it's teeth were, they were dull as spoons.

  
Meaning he'd had absolutely no fucking reason to freak out like that.

  
"Hey, buddy. This stays between you an' me, you got it?" The Lusus didn't even bother to raise it's muddy head to acknowledge him this time, and the Straggler was just fine with that.

  
Hey, wait- Mud. It was caked in mud. Sticky, globby, wet mud.

  
Of course he was familiar with the concept of underground springs, and water tables and all that jazz. His planet hadn't had anything like it, but the surrounding planets did. Most planets, if you dig deep enough, had plenty of fresh water. And it must have been our exile's lucky day, as the digging had already been done for him.  
He took a few, wide steps around the feasting mole- it was a vegetarian, but it could have still easily crushed him with it's clumsy paws- and headed back for the fissure it had left behind when it breached.

  
He approached the tunnel. The dirt around here was pretty tightly packed- you know, by multiple, violent meteorite impacts- and the basic shape of the giant's trail remained. It wasn't a completely vertical drop. The angle actually looked pretty scalable. He might even be able to climb back out if he actually went through with the stupid-ass thought blossoming in his sun-bleached brain. And if he couldn't, well, fuck it, at least no one would have the satisfaction of finding his corpse.

  
He took an experimental step into the mouth of the tunnel- it seemed stable enough. He continued down, in more of an awkward shuffle than a real stride. He sort of wished he had a rope, to make this feel a little more practical. He even entertained a short fantasy of himself, spelunking through some abandoned tomb with nothing but his trusty torch and a pistol, and probably some undead hoards or something between him and some ancient treasure.

  
No, stop that. Stop being stupid, he thought.

  
The cave continued on it's incline for at least two stories. After a few minutes of slowly sliding- practically crawling now- his feet faltered. The dirt was getting softer down here. Kind of slippery. And, either he was going crazy, or he could hear the soft babble of running water somewhere below. Great, perfect. Aside from his path growing ever more unstable underneath him, this was exactly what he wanted. Especially the part where the ground finally gave out in a minor mudslide and dropped him ten feet right onto his back

  
Ouch.

  
The angle of the tunnel left very little room for moonlight to stream into the pocket he'd found himself in, but he found he didn't need it. A writhing mass of glowing... Somethings clung to the ceiling above him. Worms, maybe? Cute.

  
Aside from the mud he'd taken with him, the ground down here was suddenly very firm, and stable. Rock, as a matter of fact. From his lovely vantage point on the ground, he could see long, sharp stalactites dripping from the roof of the cavern above him, and actually felt pleasantly cool for the first time since landing on this awful dirtball. Well, if he was stuck down here forever, at least he wouldn't die with a sunburn. Super.

  
Once his head stopped spinning, he sat up, and took a more thorough stock of his surroundings. It looked like the mole-thing's tunnel intersected with an older, naturally formed cave formation further down below. From the smell of things, the critter was camped out down here for a while. More interesting than that, however, were all the bones of it's prey.

  
Wait, no, no, that thing didn't eat meat.

  
That's right, he remembered. Trolls were born underground. Well, nothing had been born down here for a long, long time. All that was left were some scattered bones and a dried, mossy-colored stain where the caretaker and her Mothergrub had curled up with all the boneless larvae when the place was caved in by meteorites centuries ago. They must have starved to death down here in the dark while the rest of the planet was being crushed up above.

  
The exile wasn't much of a sentimental man, and his train of thought was quickly interupted when he remembered his quest. Oh, right, the water. Just a trickle, really, but he could hear it down here. Trolls wouldn't have been hatched here if there were no convinient source of water, after all. Trolls needed water, right?  
Damn, he suddenly wished he'd paid more attention to that kid's unsolicited info-dumping.

He dropped his spear for now- there was nothing down here left to kill. Even in the dull, wiggly light, he cave wasn't too hard to navigate. There were a few extra paths here and there, but it was easy enough to tell which ones were natural, and which ones had been dug by his little friend up above. What's more, the sound of the stream did a good job of guiding him, deeper in and deeper underground.

  
Solid rock under his feet slowly gave way to more soil, and soil slowly gave way to thick, squelching mud. He didn't realize how close he was to the water until his foot fell just a little further than he though, throwing up a noisy splash and almost sending him sprawling into the little stream. Actually, that didn't sound so bad. Almost immediately, he dropped to his knees to scoop up greedy handfuls of what was probably the grossest stuff he'd ever put into his mouth. Thankfully, right now, he didn't give a shit whether it tasted like mud or licorice- it was water, and he could worry about making it palatable later.

  
He stayed there for a while, rolling around in the silt like an idiot as he finally filled his stomach with something. All of his other problems didn't exist, at least for a few minutes. Today was a successful day. Now, instead of dying of thirst, he got to starve to death like those baby bugs- Wait, no, small victories, come on, Straggler. He won today, and he was going to celebrate it.

  
He was hungry, but he would celebrate.

  
-

  
_Well, this didn't look right. Everything from before should have been destroyed, or left in ruin. There certainly shouldn't have been a garishly green mansion left behind. And that mansion surely shouldn't have had a lovely, green, fully furnished parlor, with a tasteful- if very green- tea set and a small plate of finger sandwiches left behind after Armageddon. So much green might have left one wondering if their eyes were working correctly._

  
_"What's the matter? Don't you like tea?"_

  
_Ah, yes, and one more thing. There should have been no survivors left._

  
_"It's fine." She replied, taking a slow sip to prove her point. No, it wasn't the tea that was bothering her. It was absolutely everything else about the situation. And this thing's refusal to explain a single detail._

  
_"I know it is. I was only asking to be polite." He added a splash of milk to his own tea, although she wasn't sure why, as he didn't seem to have the means to drink it. He didn't have the means to fix her with a condescending smile, either, but somehow, she could feel him doing it. "Feeling better?"_

  
_"Yes." Weird though the situation may have been, it was much more preferable to wandering around on the burned-out planet below this little moon he'd taken her too. Even so, she was losing patience with her enigmatic host, and she was losing it fast._

  
_"Ha ha. Poor Snowman, so used to getting her way."_

  
_"Who are you talking to?"_

  
_"Oh, that's right, you don't go by 'Snowman' just yet, do you? Hee hee." He picked up his teacup, lifting his plush little finger as he pantomimed bringing it to his invisible lips. It would be rude not to join her, after all. "What do you prefer to be called these days, your Majesty?"_

  
_"I'd prefer you skip the games."_

  
_"'Games?'"_

  
_"Why did you bring me here?"_

  
_"Hoo hoo. Is that what's been bothering you? Why didn't you say so?" He set his cup down, leaning across the table just a bit, as if he'd had a secret to tell her. "You still have a role to play here, your Majesty, and it's much more important than prancing around in the wilderness, attempting to reattain your former glory."_

  
_"Is that so?"_

  
_"It is."_

  
-  
Alright. He couldn't tell from down here, but it had been two days since the Straggler had completed step one of his (tenuous) survival plan. Step one, of course, being to find water and food. On that subject, he had found food. Sort of. Being stuck down in a cave with a bunch of skeletons gave one something of a sense of urgency about these things- that lead to desperate decisions. And when one was desperate, licking giant glow worms off of a cave wall didn't seem so bad. Not one of his finer moments. They gave him one hell of a stomach ache, but they were keeping him alive as he'd been piling rocks up to the hole in the ceiling he'd fallen through.

  
Step two, for those playing at home, was to get out of this cave. Not permanently, of course. He'd need to be able to come and go as he wanted if he was to fulfill step three. Step three was still up in the air, but he was hoping it would involve finding something to eat besides bugs.

  
He didn't want to get too far ahead of himself, but he hoped step four might involve finding his ex-boss and turning her into fertilizer.

  
Bringing things back to step two, he felt he'd done well enough on stacking up whatever else he could find to form his ugly little staircase. (If any troll were left alive to see the desecration of this naturally formed tomb, well- it wouldn't matter either way, because the Straggler didn't give a shit.) It was far from stable, but it would just have to do, as the Straggler was running out of larger rocks and patience.

  
The stones shifted noisily under him as he clamored upward- he was no architect, it seemed, but that aforementioned loss of patience propelled him faster upward. His hasty movements, however, only caused the unstable mass beneath him to pitch back and forth, the flatter stones up top sliding, sliding, sliding, and finally falling. He was sent, once again, falling forward and planting his face on the bedrock. He'd had the clarity of mind to roll as soon as he hit dirt, narrowly avoiding most of the rocks that fell after him, aside from the pumpkin-sized chunk that landed right on his toes.

  
"Ow, fuck!" He screeched at a volume that may have been embrassing if there was anybody left on this goddamned planet to hear him making an idiot out of himself.  
In the echos left behind from his short tantrum, he almost missed something very important.

  
"Helloooooooo?"

  
He paused, suddenly quite distracted from the pain. He was starting to hear things now, right? It was dark down here- you heard things in the dark, he'd heard somewhere. You hear things when you're lonely. You definitely don't talk to your auditory hallucinations, or you might start thinking they're real. "Hello?" Whoops.  
  
"Oh, hey-yyyy!" A far-too-enthusiastic voice drifted down through the hole in the ceiling. "You okay down there?" That shrill, almost sing-song tone was kind of familiar to the Straggler. But who they were didn't matter so much until they were face-to-face.

  
"I'm stuck in a hole in the ground!" He shot back. He'd say he must have forgotten his manners in his time alone in the desert, but, really, he'd never had those to begin with. And was that bastard up there giggling?

  
"So not so good, huh?"

  
"We gonna chitchat like this 'till I grow old down here or d'you got somethin' useful to do?" He grumbled as he finally pushed the rock off his foot. Probably not broken, but probably not something he wanted to walk on right away. As if that were an option.

  
"I got some rope!"

  
There was a very loud pause as the Straggler pushed himself up and waited for some elaboration, some action, or, really anything. "Yeah, and?"

  
"Ya want, maybe, I should throw it down for ya?"

  
"Well, shucks, that'd be swell!" It occurred then, to the Straggler, that the man he was dealing with might not have been as brilliant as the average toddler. "And why don'cha hold on to one end of it, too, huh?"

  
Disembodied-idiot-voice giggled again- he'd heard that laugh before somewhere, he must have. "How 'bout I tie it to somethin' instead?"

"That'd be great, thanks." He perched himself at the top of what was left of his pile of crap. Whatever didn't fall must have been stable enough to sit on, at the least.  
Now that the voice was done distracting him for the moment, it gave the Straggler time to consider his situation. There was, of yet, no reason to trust the mystery voice up above. Sure, the guy seemed friendly now, but that didn't mean squat out here in the wasteland. It was a lot easier to shank someone and make off with their meager possessions if they weren't at the bottom of a hole.

  
While the idea of company was nice, our exile had already made up his mind about getting the first strike.

  
"Is'at long enough?" The voice from above called, drawing the Straggler's attention to the fraying rope that now dangled a few feet above his head. "Hope so, 'cause that's all I got!" Again with the laughter. The Straggler was very glad that this guy was having such a fun post-apocalypse up there.

  
"It'll do." He pushed himself up to his feet- ow, that was still aching- and took the rope. It was a tough climb at first- the Straggler didn't often find time to practice his rope climbing- but once he'd made his way up a story or two, the walls began to slope. By now, the harsh sunlight was beginning to hit him right in the face, nearly obscuring his view of his savior up top.

  
A slight Dersite stood at the mouth of the fissure, shuffling from foot to foot as he watched the Straggler climb with the dumbest grin imaginable. "Hey, I know you!" He beamed, and began pulling at the rope to hasten the other man's ascent.

  
And the Straggler knew him, too, from... Somewhere. But, that didn't mean they were on good terms. He kept a hand on his bag, ready to snatch the makeshift blade within it, and waited for the man to continue.

  
"Yeah, yeah, you're that, uuuh. The Sovereign Slayer, right? Yeah, that's right! You remember your old pal the Courtyard Droll!"

  
The Straggler cringed, hearing that old title sent a wave of nausea through him. It hadn't been a full week, and already he couldn't picture it anymore. Some pathetic little pencil pusher, chained to a desk and under the thumb of that pompous bitch and her tepid little husband. No way was that him. "Ain't no Sovereign around for me to slay for, kid."

  
"I get'cha. Ain't no more courtyard for me to droll in, neither!" If this was just occurring to the kid, he didn't seem to shaken up about it. "Well, what'll be, then? Jack?"

  
Even his own name sounded wrong in his ears now- no, not his name. Just the name of some hapless NPC, a slave to the Game. Well, the game was over. Jack Noir was dead, and the Straggler had killed him. "That ain't right, neither."

  
"You ain't leavin' me much to work with here, fella." The former-Droll made a big show of how hard he was thinking as he would up his rope. He 'hmmmmm'ed and 'hum'ed for a few seconds as he tucked it away in his own pack- a hollowed out pumpkin with a strip of cloth wound around some holes.

  
Wait a minute.

  
"Where the hell did you find a pumpkin?"

  
"What pumpkin?"

  
"That fuckin' pumpkin!" Did melons grow in the desert? Didn't they need a ton more water than gross, rubber leaves? Were they hardy enough to survive planet-ending disaster? Were pumpkins even the same thing as melons? The Straggler knew nothing about plants, but surely this had to mean something.

  
"Oh, this thing." He flicked at the strap over his shoulder, just as smug as if he were showing off a new, high-end hat or some sort. "Real nice, huh? I got it from the Appearifyer-thingie."

  
"The what."

  
"You know, in the giant skull thing."

  
He rubbed at tired eyes, and wondered if keeping this guy around might actually be worse for his mental state than an eternity of lonely wandering. "Are you messin' with me now, or what?"

  
"No, it's a real, actual, bonefied thing!" He nodded his head emphatically as he spoke, the motion carrying through his entire, tiny body. "It's near that statue with the frog over by that totalled mountain range over that way, you musta seen it." He made a vague motion towards some cliffs in the distance that the Straggler had yet to visit.

  
"An' you're sayin' that stuff grows there?" Most Dersites, this one included, didn't care for vegetables. Couldn't even digest them. But, most Dersites were smart enough to know that meat was easier to find where it could eat.

  
"Nah, it just appears there sometimes. Ya know, that's why it's called an Appearifyer-thing." If he didn't know any better, the Straggler might have been tempted to think this little asshole rolled his eyes at him.

  
This was going nowhere. "Tell ya what." He said, before the little guy broke a brain cell or something trying to explain this in a rational manner. "You show me where you found that pumpkin, and I'll show you where to find water. How 'bout that?"

  
"I don't need water, I got Tab." He produced a pink can from his pumpkin-bag as proof. He chuckled as he cracked it open. "But, I'll take ya there, anyhow. We was always on the same side back home, ya know." He took a quick swig, before offering the can to his former co-worker. "Cheers?"

  
He hesitated for a moment. This guy seemed sincere enough. Or at least too stupid to get a jump on him. Maybe this could work. "Cheers." He grunted as he accepted the can. After a tentative taste, he immediately spat the disgustingly fake-sweet sip back out. "That shit's nasty. Let's go."

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, you just really gotta write about Slick and the boys, you know what I mean?


End file.
